Prof Sam Wass and Dr Gemma Goldenberg are child psychologists and researchers working at Institute for the Science of Early Years and Youth. Sam, based at the University of East London, is an affiliate member of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience.

“Take Action on Distraction” is the first book in the Bloomsbury series  ‘Putting Neuroscience into Practice” and was published on 27th February 2025. In this blog, Sam discusses the new approach that the book takes.

“For decades, research on attention and focus in educational settings has relied on experimental paradigms designed to measure a child’s ‘pure’ cognitive capacity for voluntarily attention control. These attention tasks, commonly used by educational and clinical psychologists, aim to study the developmental correlates of voluntary attention control and how voluntary attention control is instantiated in the brain.  

My first 10 years or so as a scientist were spent working almost entirely with this type of task. I spent my PhD on an MRC-funded program that used experimental tasks to train voluntary attention control in young children. After that, I moved to the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences unit at Cambridge and took part in a number of similar studies. 

Executive function training doesn’t work – why?

10 years on, we’re now pretty sure that running this type of attention training doesn’t offer general benefits. Although it might lead to performance improvements in the specific task being trained, these training effects don’t translate to real-world outcomes. This has led some researchers to question this whole approach to studying brain and behaviour. For me, this meant paying attention to those hard-to-publish findings that had been nagging me for years but were often swept under the carpet. For example, experimental measures of voluntary attention control show little association with other tasks designed to measure the same thing, or even with themselves, when the same tests were administered repeatedly to the same children.

Increasingly, this led me to question: can we abstract a ‘pure’ measure of a child’s capacity for voluntary attention control, independent of context or setting? If we can’t, this is big news – because it means that we need to completely change our whole approach to studying attention development in children. 

So, when Bloomsbury Education asked me and my colleague Gemma Goldenberg to write a book on supporting attention and focus in children, we set ourselves the aim of thinking about attention differently. So, if we weren’t going to focus on executive function tests and training, what did we talk about instead? 

Emphasising that attention control is context-specific

Instead of talking about ‘pure’ cognitive capacities, we have emphasised the context-specificity of attention.

“WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT WHY SOME SETTINGS ARE EASIER FOR CHILDREN TO CONCENTRATE IN THAN OTHERS”

We talk about how, and why, some settings are easier for children to concentrate in than others – and offer practical tips for how teachers can optimise their setting. We emphasise that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach – that a particular setting may be optimal for one child but sub-optimal for another, and that it is the fit between a child and their setting that is key. 

We also discuss how, and why, some types of content are easier for children to concentrate on than others. We discuss how familiarity, and predictability, can make it easier to concentrate on some things. Again, this is not  ‘one-size-fits-all’ – content can be more or less predictable, and consequently more or less easy to focus on, depending on the child and their learning stage. 

This different approach will, we hope, offer some easy, practical tips for teachers on how to improve attention and focus in young children and encourage people to think about how factors like the physical environment, movement and emotion play a role in attention, rather than attention being a discrete skill that happens in isolation. 

It’s definitely controversial though! So please do check it out – you’ll receive a 25% discount if you enter ‘DISTRACTION25’ when ordering through the Bloomsbury website – and, if you have any thoughts – email us – Sam and Gemma – at s.v.wass@uel.ac.uk and g.goldenberg@uel.ac.uk.”